This Is Why I Teach……
January 16, 2008 by googtweetblog
Happy sigh………yesterday was one of those “this is why I love teaching” days. The best part about it was that it wasn’t really planned, things just flowed into an incredible (in my opinion) lesson. My 6th graders were all starting to get warmed up in their typing program and since that’s pretty tedious to watch, I wandered over to the piano (don’t ask why I have a piano in my computer lab, I have NO idea!) and played the little 3 key song I know. Of course this got the kids’ attention, so I let the kids take turns coming up to play songs they knew, under the condition that everyone else keep working. It was SO cool - here’s why:
- It turned out to be such a great tie-in with typing and another way for the kids to understand why I don’t want them to look at their hands when trying to learn the keys: when playing the piano, you should be able to play without looking because you’re often reading sheet music. (Feel free to add in any other parallels, I’m truly not much of a musician!)
- It provided great background music, which is always helpful in this kind of repetitous learning activity and as one kids said, “Bach helps babies.” Gotta love ‘em.
- It gave the kids a chance to shine in an arena not usually available during regular classtime, since music classes are separate from the core areas and not all kids participate
Wait, there’s more! So after we’re done with the music and finished typing practice for the day, the kids did their keyboarding assignment on the class blog and then finally learned about Singapore on the student blog, where I helped a student create a post about it. I can’t get enough of blogging with my 6th graders, it’s completely changed how the kids view keyboarding and using computers at school. It’s also really helped their writing skills.
Still more! I had the student quote Wikipedia (check out the post) and THEN used that to explain why Wikipedia could possibly not always be accurate, due to the wiki-ness of it. So today, we’re going to investigate and do some fact-checking on OTHER sites (using various search engines) to make sure Wikipedia was telling us the truth.
So, yesterday was a great teaching day. Can’t wait to see what today will bring!
Challenge Notes: I wasn’t able to find anyone to do a reader-audit of my blog, so anyone visiting, please give me some feedback! I’m still going to do the reader-audit, though, just didn’t get it done on day 2. Day 3’s challenge - join a forum. That’s too easy! I’m already very active on Classroom 2.0, somewhat active on Passionate Teachers, and just joined Building a Better Blog. I’m making superb connections and have learned oodles. So, Day 3 is done! I’ll just make sure I go participate in a discussion on each of them today.
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I do not even think I can be bothered to comment on the forums I belong to. What I should do, thought, is put a signature on my emails - will that count toward today’s activities!!??
I truly believe that you can’t teach only for the $$ and holidays - you do it because you love seeing how people grow - and often how you grow with your students.
I had to grin when you mentioned that it was “such a great tie” to have the piano music during this keyboarding lesson. In ‘another life’ (a long, long time ago) I too was a Business Education teacher - and when I first started teaching in a small South Australian Country school - there were only manual typewriters for the students to learn to touch type. There was also record player with ‘typing’ records. The previous teacher would play a special ‘typing record’ and the students were then expected to type to the ‘rhythm of the record’ and they learned their keys - perhaps keyboarding is all about ‘rhythm’?